Long-form opinion. Illustrated commentary. Editorial letters.
Printed in ink-weight prose.
There is a particular kind of reader who finishes a newspaper and feels, not informed, but cheated. Who reaches the end of an article and finds that the argument, such as it was, dissolved somewhere in the third paragraph into hedging and balance and the careful avoidance of anything that might be called a claim. Broadsheet is for that reader.
We publish opinion essays, illustrated commentary, and editorial letters — the kind of writing that arrives with the unhurried gravity of a Sunday broadside. Each piece is a conviction, set in prose with the weight of ink on cotton stock. We are not interested in takes. We are interested in arguments.
"An argument well-made can rearrange a mind. That is the only ambition worth having."
Our readers are restless generalists. Lapsed academics nursing cold coffee at kitchen tables. Policy staffers who underline paragraphs in group chats. Anyone who still believes the sentence is the unit of thought, and that thought deserves room to breathe.
New York · Twenty-two years in print
"I am not interested in what people believe. I am interested in whether they can defend it."
Former deputy editor at two broadsheets that no longer exist. She has been wrong in print on four continents and considers this a credential. She edits with a red pen and means it.
London · Ink on cotton stock
"Every illustration is an argument. The line you choose is the position you take."
Her work has appeared in places that pay poorly and matter enormously. She draws with ink on paper, scans at 1200 dpi, and refuses to apologise for the grain.
Lagos · London · In the margins
"The footnote is where the honest writer lives. The text is the performance. The note is the confession."
Political economist by training, contrarian by vocation. His first essay for Broadsheet runs to four thousand words and contains, by his count, eleven positions he expects to regret.
The Meritocracy Myth — by James Okafor
The meritocracy was never a description of how things work. It was a permission slip. A way of saying that the people at the top deserve to be there, which has the useful secondary effect of implying that the people at the bottom deserve that too. We adopted it not because it was true but because it was comfortable — and because the alternative, that position is mostly inherited and luck is mostly structural, requires a reckoning that most institutions are not equipped to survive.
The word itself was coined as a satire. Michael Young wrote The Rise of the Meritocracy in 1958 as a dystopian warning — a society in which intelligence, measured and certified, becomes the new aristocracy, and the losers are told they have no one to blame but themselves. He was horrified when politicians began citing it approvingly. He wrote an op-ed in 2001, at eighty-six, to clarify that he had meant it as a warning, not a blueprint. Nobody much cared.
"The losers were told they had no one to blame but themselves. This is not a feature of meritocracy. It is the point."
What we call meritocracy now is something different and more insidious. It is a system in which the selection criteria are set by the people already selected, in which the tests are written by those who have already passed them, and in which the cultural capital required to navigate the whole apparatus is distributed so unevenly that calling the result merit is, at minimum, an act of considerable imaginative generosity...
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